The National Assembly is now expected to introduce a bill criminalising payment for sex. Clients would be jailed for six months or fined nearly $4,000.

Jacques Myard, another right-wing member of the commission, says prostitution should be eradicated because it exploits human beings.

"That means those who force women to prostitute should be punished and that very hard," he said.

Double standards

The commission says nine prostitutes out of 10 are victims of human trafficking, but sex workers protesting outside the National Assembly disagreed.

Some sex workers say the law will penalise them but leave pimps and organised crime networks untouched.

"We're not all part of those networks," one sex worker said.

"Let them tackle the networks efficiently and to the end, but let go of people like me who for years have paid tax, who were recognised as prostitutes and who now have only 417 euros in pension pay."

Bronwyn Winter, an Associate Professor of French at the University of Sydney, says the proposed new bill is in line with an existing law in France that makes it illegal to solicit clients or operate brothels.

"Which has actually been used to penalise women in prostitution rather than the client, so that's actually been disadvantageous to prostitution," she said.

Liberal attitudes

"Well I think we need to make a distinction between sex and prostitution; I don't think we're talking at all about the same thing," she said.

"Prostitution is a very specific way of constructing sexuality which is commodifying sex."

Professor Winter says abolitionist movements have been pressuring the French government for a long time, but she says it is back on the agenda because of recent news of a prostitution ring running out of a luxury hotel in Lille.

And people have been talking a lot about Dominique Strauss-Kahn since he was accused of raping a chamber maid in New York.

"Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the actions around Dominique Strauss-Kahn have put violence against women, prostitution, rape back on the agenda and a lot of feminists have been making the links between those things," Professor Winter said.